Roger Miner

In July 1994, physician Timothy E. Quill and two other doctors unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of New York State’s prohibitions against assisted suicide. They appealed the decision in that case, and in Quill v. Vacco, Roger Miner, a circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, ruled in their favor. The following viewpoint is excerpted from Miner’s decision, in which he asserts that the ban against assisted suicide is unconstitutional because it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Under the ban, he writes, patients who are on life-support systems may legally hasten their death by turning off the machines, but terminally ill patients who are not on life support do not have that option. Such a distinction between the two classes of patients is unconstitutional...